


The Love Song of P. Alfred Jones

by Milotzi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, Missed Chance, Regret, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 16:15:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14168703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milotzi/pseuds/Milotzi
Summary: Severus Snape, who has left his name behind a long time ago, has a coffee every day and reads the paper. Life is bitter and so is his coffee. There are some good memories but mainly regrets.





	The Love Song of P. Alfred Jones

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Bitter Brew](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14121207) by [Alisanne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alisanne/pseuds/Alisanne). 
  * Inspired by [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/367668) by T. S. Eliot. 



> Originally posted on [LJ ](https://milotzi.livejournal.com/7155.html) and written for the March 2018 challenge of [HP Coffeehouse](https://hp-coffeehouse.livejournal.com/): I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. - T.S. Eliot.  
> Minor textual and spelling revisions have been made.  
> The wonderful [ Alisanne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alisanne/pseuds/Alisanne) has already written a [most beautiful story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14121207) with this pairing relating to this challenge and I would like to acknowledge that she was the first to connect the bitter taste of black coffee with Severus's unhappiness and coffee with this couple's relationship. I love her version of events and her story. After reading it, I wondered about the meaning of the original T.S. Eliot quote, re-read [his poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock) and the sense of loneliness and wasted opportunities to connect with other people in it hit me and I asked myself what the story of Severus surviving would be like if he was more like J. Alfred Pufrock and missed his chance and grew old lonely and bitter instead. In the spirit of pastiche, I have used some of the poem, some of Shakespeare's words and other references to works of art to evoke this Severus. 
> 
> As for the name Jones for Severus, alas, Smith as a pseudonym for Snape was already taken by the incomparable [ Kelly Chambliss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelly_chambliss/profile) in the wonderful stories of the Adela universe. Smith is the most common surname in Britain; Jones is the second most common one. And so Severus Snape and J. Alfred Pufrock merged into P. Alfred Jones.

Almost every morning, P. Alfred Jones has toast and tea for breakfast. He then does some paperwork before leaving his sparsely furnished flat for a stroll along the streets of the city in search of a local muggle paper and, much more difficult and potentially even dangerous to obtain, the wizarding paper that he has – except for one extended period in his life – read every day since he turned fifteen. 11 o'clock in the morning finds him reading these papers in his favourite _café_ , _caffè_ , _cafeteria_ , _coffee shop_ , _Kaffeehaus_ or whatever the local name is. He spends longer than other patrons reading his papers and drinking one _café noir_ , _lungo_ , _café solo_ , _espresso_ , _Kleiner Schwarzer_ – any local black coffee that he can get, as black and bitter as possible. Even though he avoids any personal contact with people other than waiters or shopkeepers and has not spoken to any witch or wizard in nearly a century, he likes to keep abreast of what is going on in the wizarding world. After all, a long time ago, he was a bit-player in these affairs. Never more than that but maybe the play would not have been the same without him, even if his role turned out to be that of a foolish servant of two masters rather than the hero. On the days when he feels especially cheated by fate or the pain in his throat and neck refuses to respond to the painkillers he has taken, he is sure that the bard got it right and life was “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” On his better days he knows that, while he will always wonder about the roads not taken, his life has had its better moments. His better days are becoming rarer.

When he has visited a place a few times, he knows that the locals begin to consider him a regular, an old man with thinning white hair and a crab-like gait whose clothes look slightly strange and who comes in every morning to drink his coffee and peruse the papers he brings with him through a magnifying glass. When they become too familiar with him, he knows it is time to find a new place because, above all else, he wishes to be alone. Later in the day, he may or may not visit an art gallery or a museum, browse through the shelves for some large-print novels or volumes of poetry in a bookshop or library; he may or may not buy a ticket for a concert or an opera for the evening; he may or may not have a light late lunch, followed by an afternoon nap, especially if he goes out again. Whether he goes out again depends as much on the weather as it does on how strong or weak he feels. He is a light eater, and dinner may be tea and toast again. Sometimes he just goes to bed and rather than run into the danger of being kept awake by pain and regrets, he takes a mixture of painkillers and a sleeping draught. Because he is getting on in years, he is not at his best in the evening, so sometimes he takes his painkillers-cum-sleeping-draught twice. This has not killed him yet. Looked at from the vantage point of the age he has reached, his days after that day in Sidney seem to run into each other, variations of a theme: if not identical then most similar to one another. Even so there is one fixture: the black coffee he drinks every morning at 11 o'clock and the papers he reads. It is the time of the day when his mind is clearest. It is the time of the day when he looks at what has become of the world. It is the one time of the day when he reminds himself of what was and what could have been. It is the time of day when he remembers the wizard who was Severus Snape.

When he first decided to use the name Jones instead of his own, Severus had not much thought about it but just chosen the first one that came to mind. Jones had, however, proved to be a most useful name. There are millions of Joneses in the world and cities are anonymous places. So if one Jones in his eighties moved away from one city – let's say to live closer to his (non-existent) children or grandchildren, nephews or nieces, younger brothers or sisters – and another Jones in his late sixties or early seventies turned up in another city, a city he had always dreamed of retiring to, no one connected the dots. Since muggles living beyond their early eighties start attracting attention and are in danger of local dignitaries congratulating them on their birthdays and of newspapers reporting on the oldest resident being thus congratulated, Jones has had to move a number of times. One Jones less in one city and one Jones more in another. What city ceased to matter to him a long time ago. What difference does it make, after all: All cities have shops, museums, concert halls, opera houses, libraries, and, most important of all, coffee houses in which he can have his 11 o'clock ritual of facing the world and reckoning with his past.

Before he retired at sixty-five, the man who called himself Jones, who had left his old existence behind, had not lived in a city. He had lived in an isolated place somewhere in the middle of nowhere on the continent of Australia. He had chosen his hiding place wisely, he had thought. Australia was a country you could disappear into and not be found.

Occasionally, the man who was called Jones allowed his thoughts to turn to the one person he missed. Minerva. She had been the one person in his adult life, muggle, witch or wizard, who he had neither felt impatient with or contemptuous towards and who he trusted did not despise him. Until what he had done meant that she did. Sometimes he asked himself whether she had forgiven him once she had discovered that he had acted for the greater good. And then he remembered her face whenever Albus had mentioned “the greater good”. Occasionally, though, he thought he would maybe chance it and return to Scotland, and then he thought that not enough or too much time had passed and decided that he dare not go back and disturb her life. As time went on, he clung to the fact that in wizarding years he was not yet middle-aged and she was not old and so there would be time enough.

Not having yet decided to add a sleeping draught to the painkillers he took, the man who began to think of himself as Jones lay awake for a good part of most nights of the first quarter of a century of his new life. Most of the time his thoughts took him back to things he felt he would do better to forget, even the good times with Minerva. Some nights, however, he indulged himself, and he thought about the times when they used to take weekends off to go to Edinburgh and London, and then in later years to Paris, Cologne, Prague, Vienna and Madrid. And they would spend their days exploring the city leisurely, like flâneurs. Every morning walk and every afternoon foray into the city would end up in a coffee shop, and they'd read the books they'd bought, and look at picture postcards of art bought in the museums they had visited and discuss the music they had heard the night before. And when no-one was looking they would exchange kisses that tasted of coffee and cigarettes. There had been private jokes, teasing and fun arguments, too, as when they had been to that Wagner opera. Severus and Minerva had spent an entire day arguing whether the Rhinemaidens were some sort of mermaids since all rivers ended up in the sea or not. That argument had actually become quite heated and had led to the best sex they had ever had, right there and then by the river along which they were strolling. He couldn't remember was it the Rhine, the Seine or the Danube but he remembered the smell of the water and the cold stone of the pavement under his back and his arse, as a wild witch was riding his rigid broom under the night sky and the protection of all the spells his lust-addled brain had been able to think of before she started sucking his cock, both of them unable or unwilling to wait until they had reached their hotel. At this point the man who had for a moment forgotten that his name was supposed to be Jones always got up, to stop that particular train of thought because he suddenly could not bear to think of what he no longer had. But then he would end up making himself a mug of coffee and smoking a cigarette to remind himself of what he got up to stop thinking about. And during those times returning seemed both possible and impossible. Maybe impossible now, a small voice of hope would murmur, but surely there would be time enough.

When the ancient wizard who is yet another and maybe the last incarnation of Jones sits down to read his papers, drink his coffee and face his past in yet another coffee shop, it is not so much the cafés he visited with Minerva all that time ago, some of which he has returned to in previous lives as Jones-who-has-retired-and-now-lives-in-the-city, that he thinks about. What he thinks of is that one moment in that coffee shop at the airport in Sidney when he was waiting for his flight. Because, when he retired at sixty-five, Jones, no Severus, had begun to think that maybe he might be Snape again and that he would stop being afraid of what might come and talk to Minerva and ask her the question, the only question that should matter to him, whether she could find it in herself to forgive him. So he had packed his few belongings and booked the 15-hour flight to London.

Every morning for the past fifty years or so, in some city or another, P. Alfred Jones has had a coffee to remind him of the bitterness of life and a look at the papers because that is what he should have been doing every morning from the moment he was well enough. Because then what he read that morning at the airport café in Sidney in the one-week old _Daily Prophet_ some wizard or witch had left behind would not have come as a surprise. Because then he would already have read about her retirement a decade previously, due to ill health, and not – as he had done on that day in Sidney – reports about her death, alone in a Scottish cottage, and her obituary. And had he read about her retirement due to ill health instead of her death, he would have stopped being afraid, and he would have dared to disturb her and travelled to ask her that overwhelming question that now he would never get an answer to, about whether she could forgive him. And maybe they would have had enough time – not to revisit cities they had known together or explore new ones – but just to be together instead of each living and dying alone and apart.


End file.
